I am a leader by default, because nature abhors a vacuum. (Desmond Tutu)

May 04, 2009

that image of the spreadsheet in the PDF you sent me is not the public record you are required to share

I've become one of those people who requests and then reads the "board packets" for meetings of public bodies. These are fascinating things, generally 50-150 page tomes of memos, spreadsheets, graphs, charts, and news clippings that the staff of a public body will prepare for its board to go into a public meeting.

The fascinating thing from a technical point of view is just how many of these board packets include spreadsheets, and how many of the spreadsheets are presented either as bitmapped images or as text-only documents. In either case, there's no way to know how the spreadsheet is constructed, whether the totals presented really add up to the totals displayed, and what if anything is hidden in the model used to come up with the numbers.

The latest one of these I'm getting clarification on is a spreadsheet where the numbers simply don't add up - one row of expenses where the sum of the figures doesn't jive with the total presented. And I can't look at that without thinking a lot more about what else I might be missing, either by accident or design.

The former CFO of a company that produces electronic databases of
archived information from publishers settled charges made by the
Securities and Exchange Commission that, with the use of spreadsheet
aids, he made fraudulent monthly and quarterly and accounting entries
for more than five years.

As part of the alleged scheme, Scott Hirth, who was vice president
of finance and CFO of the information and learning division of ProQuest
Company from 1999 through 2005, created false documentation to back up
the balances in accounts he allegedly manipulated, according to the
SEC. His account-reconciliation spreadsheets, for instance, contained
"hidden rows" so that false account entries didn't show up when they
were printed in hard copy, according to the complaint.